How not to ask questions or bait the community

Posted by Morbus Iff on January 13, 2006 at 2:32pm

User joins #drupal, a developer channel, which clearly states in the /topic to "Use #drupal-support or http://drupal.org/support for support questions.":

--> user has joined #drupal
<user> Just installed drupal. created an administration signon. What now?
<killes> user go to #drupal-support
<Morbus> move to #drupal-support?
<Morbus> heh!
* Morbus high-fives killes.
<user> *sigh* thanks.

User joins #drupal-support, a support channel:

--> user has joined #drupal-support
<user>  Just installed drupal. created an administration signon. What now?
<Morbus> you certainly must know what you want your drupal site to be, yes?
<Morbus> that's like saying "i've bought a pencil and sharpened it. what now?"
<Morbus> there's no way we could possibly answer the question.
<user> You could:
<user> 1) point me to a tutorial
<user> 2) ask me what I am trying to do and help me decide
<user> 3) offer suggestions as to what you would od.
<user> or any number of other course than masterbating your ego
<Morbus> tutorials are irrelevant if we don't know what you want to learn.
<Morbus> drupal is a framework. it could make a thousand different sites.
<Morbus> 2) was implied in my first response.
<Morbus> 3) waste of bandwidth. I could spend 3 days talking and not once be relevant to your needs
<user> thanks anyways. THis conversation WILL go into the article.
<user> bye
<Morbus> oh noe, i'm so fearful.
<-- user has quit ("Leaving")

If you don't understand why this is wrong, please reread How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. The fact that the user was also baiting the community for some misplaced "community support" metric for his grandiose "article" is even worse: I am quite expectant that his readers will realize the folly of his approach.

Comments

LMAO! Sounds like a

Posted by Zen on January 13, 2006 at 2:48pm

LMAO! Sounds like a candidate for bash.org :D

-K

Ooo. I wanna see the article!

Posted by dman on January 13, 2006 at 2:55pm

... just for a laugh.

I liked the line about the pencil BUT it does actually describe the current gulf between the "Now What?" installers and the ability to actually answer useful questions.

The short answer is probably 'click "Create Content"'
(which might be more accessible, albeit less accurate if it was just labelled 'New Page')

.dan.

http://www.coders.co.nz/

_{.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards}

shrug

Posted by sys6x on January 13, 2006 at 4:51pm

it's funny how some noobs take for account that we'll guess what they want...

looks like this guy installed drupal for fun without knowing what was drupal

in fact, my comment, resumed in 2 words : no comment

Heh, he left just when you

Posted by cog.rusty on January 13, 2006 at 4:55pm

Heh, he left just when you were getting somewhere. It could go on like this:

(user) thanks anyways. THis conversation WILL go into the article.
(Morbus) ah! so you want to publish an article! first you copy the text from your irc log and then you click "Create Content".
...

ah comon...

Posted by sys6x on January 13, 2006 at 4:56pm

like if he needed ppl to tell him what content to put on his site

Morbus, you gotta be more diplomatic

Posted by robertDouglass on January 13, 2006 at 5:35pm

<user> Just installed drupal. created an administration signon. What now?
<Morbus> Congratulations <user>! You've already achieved a lot, but the best 
<Morbus> is yet to come. Now you get your complimentary bottle of champagne, caviar 
<Morbus> and crackers from the Drupal developers. Do you prefer red or black caviar?

See, if you don't tell them about the champagne and caviar right away, they loose patience with Drupal.

- Robert Douglass

-----
My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress

my Drupal book | Twitter | Senior Drupal Advisor, Acquia | Advisor ICanLocalize

Wait, hold on a sec

Posted by Fool2 on January 13, 2006 at 5:47pm

I don't see any caviar or champagne. Did forms API break it for 4.7?

CaviarAPI.module

Posted by eaton on January 13, 2006 at 6:05pm

It's contrib. ;)

--
Jeff Eaton | I heart Drupal.

--
Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | Project: Snowman

How to answer questions the smart way

Posted by Geary on January 13, 2006 at 6:27pm

If you guys could take a little break from congratulating each other about how you witty you are and how dumb the n00b was...

Have you considered that there is such a thing as ANSWERING a question the smart way?

You would have had a completely different outcome with a reply like this:

Thanks for trying out Drupal. It's hard to answer your question, since I don't know what your plans are for your website. But this tutorial has some good information that will help you get started:

http://drupal.org/node/258

Why don't you read through that and experiment a bit, and then if you have any specific questions, drop by again and we'll be happy to chat about them.

Instead, you made the Drupal community look bad. "user" is now turned off by Drupal and will tell his friends about his unpleasant experience.

Is that what you want?

Was I a grouch this morning or what?

Posted by Geary on January 14, 2006 at 12:23am

Isn't it ironic that in a comment criticizing this thread and Morbus's IRC chat, I come across like a holier-than-thou jerk?

Sorry, Morbus (and everyone). Maybe I should consider that there is such a thing as posting comments the smart way. ;-)

In my defense, I'll say that I have a pretty good track record of helping out newbies in the Drupal forums. But of course that pales compared to all the contributions Morbus has made to Drupal.

If you could, go back to my first comment and ignore everything I said except for the grey box in the middle. That's the one part I got right. You don't have to be quite so wordy, but take the approach I took there. Even if a n00b has a bit of an attitude and asks a dumb open-ended question, so what? Don't let it get to you. There is probably some useful resource you can point them toward--and I don't mean How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. You don't even have to embellish it with the "thanks, and stop by later"--that just gets you bonus points. :-)

I may be more sensitive to this issue than usual, because right now I am learning Rails, and even though I know Ruby pretty well, I am once again a clueless newbie.

Aren't we all clueless newbies about something or other? So let's treat each other nice.

Peace,

-Mike

Whose shoes are you walking in?

Posted by solipsist on January 13, 2006 at 6:30pm

"User" is clearly a prick but it doesn't make his question irrelevant. If the same question was asked in a polite way would you have answered it?

Also, do you think Average Joe would bother to read 20 pages of compact text about asking questions? Would you if you were in need of quick help?

If you ever want anyone to ask questions the right way you have to cut that document down to about half a page, sum it up in points as a bulleted list and find a way for people to see it, right away, before they post. Make users think "what do they need to know in order to provide a relevant and to-the-point reply?".

You need to take on the user's perspective, not the expert's here. Without patience people are gonna shun this place and the comments I've read about support here, people criticizing the respones they've got, have been met with righteous posts in the lines of "it's free, don't complain". You got to ask yourself what kind of image you want people to have of Drupal and its supporting community. What matters is what AVERAGE JOE thinks, not you.

--
Jakob Persson - NodeOne

I agree

Posted by sys6x on January 13, 2006 at 9:55pm

I hate to read chan rules or that kind of stuff longer than a screen (I'm in 2560x768 so I consider it high nuff)... So, indeed, max 20 bullets, even 15, should define what you want the users to understand...

Please do keep us up to date

Posted by leafish_dylan on January 13, 2006 at 7:01pm

Please do keep us up to date with all of your future smart-assery. I simply cannot wait to read more of thes... no, I'm lying.

The world is full of "newbies" who don't know or care how they should be asking questions. You can either ignore them, help them, or point them at the documentation. Insulting them or making them look stupid makes us all look like elitist morons. If you treated newbies on the drupal.org forums like that, I think you'd annoy a lot of people very quickly.

I agree that the world would be a better place if people knew how to ask questions, but in reality they don't. It's easier to ignore them, or point them somewhere where they can help themselves.

Maybe I'm getting old, but I think this is an incredibly immature thread to be posting on a site like Drupal.org.

demolicious | leafish

I personally found it quite

Posted by Zen on January 13, 2006 at 8:06pm

I personally found it quite hilarious, as my aforeposted capitalised acronym indicates. You are obviously just not an IRC user :)

So, let's all lighten up shall we?

And for the record.. Morbus is a very helpful chap, but with a sense of humour that apparently isn't for everybody :)

So for all you newbies that are apparently getting scared off by this thread - don't :)

And for all the people who are shocked beyond disbelief at the treatment being meted out to hapless n00bs, please take the time to help the support channels as well as/besides these fora by pitching in yourself with your time and experience.

I'm sure being an IRC user will allow for some perspective on this thread :)

my 10p
-K

in a past life

Posted by pamphile on January 13, 2006 at 8:43pm

Actually, I was a operator on Efnet's #Unix . ;)

http://goingtochina.com - I love China - Chinese Tourism and Business
http://01Business.com - Business 2 Business Directory

I've been using IRC for 10

Posted by leafish_dylan on January 14, 2006 at 9:10pm

I've been using IRC for 10 years. I know what it's like, which is why I don't waste my time with it much these days.

I think my point is this: if you volunteer to do something, (like sit in an IRC support channel all day talking to clueless newbies) you don't really have any right to complain about the situation. Go do something else instead, or help out in another way.

demolicious | leafish

#drupal-support and other

Posted by Morbus Iff on January 13, 2006 at 7:01pm

#drupal-support and other channels I support, such as #apache, get upwards of hundreds of questions a day. Oftentimes, there are multiple people asking, and multiple conversations happening. If I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out his *real* question when someone doesn't ask one intelligently (or rather, asks to ask a question, and then storm off in a huff when no one answers them) then I'd never answer anything - I'd be pulling teeth trying to ferret out the real motivation or pleading with someone who doesn't understand that "patience" is defined in days, not minutes. I have no desire to do this. If you ask a stupid question, but ask it intelligently, then, yes, of course I would answer.

<user> im theming my site with phptemplate as it seems to be most versatile of all the engines
<user> and i got a ready page structure but i am not sure what tpl.php files do what
<Morbus> user: http://drupal.org/phptemplate
<user> yep, ive read all i can find there
<Morbus> alright, where are you stuck?

As for politeness, that's not in the cards at all. In fact, he *did* ask the question "politely" - there's not an ounce of hostility in his first sentence. And, my reply, verbatim, didn't contain an ounce of hostility either. He just didn't receive the answer he *immediately* wanted, because he had a preconceived notion of what support he was *expecting* from a piece of free, opensource software, and an IRC channel that people sit in day in and day out, with no pay. That's when things got hostile. And, yes, if he hadn't left, and had actually asked an intelligible question, I would have answered it. Would I have bantered back and forth with him to get to a real, answerable question? Probably not. I've got much better things to do.

http://www.disobey.com/
http://www.gamegrene.com/

http://www.disobey.com/
http://druplicon.info/

Support burnout?

Posted by Heine on January 13, 2006 at 8:06pm

Verbatim from freenode.net

Don't be caught by support burnout. It's nearly impossible to answer every technical question that comes to your channel. In many cases, the problem doesn't lie in the technical aspects of the question; cultural barriers may get in the way of communication, or it may be difficult to explain to a newbie just where to begin. When you try to answer every question, regardless of difficulty, you set yourself up for support burnout.

Support burnout is nearly always accompanied by the feeling that you're losing control of your time, that the people you've set out to help are making unreasonable demands. The problem is that you're taking on too much responsibility; but it begins to appear instead that the problem is the end user who's asking for help.

Different people react to support burnout in different ways. Some offer malicious advice ("rm -rf /" etc.) to newbies. Some insist that every question a newbie asks should be answered with a URL or by lists of manual references. When the staff of a support channel suffer from support burnout, they're likely to set arbitrary rules for participation; these might include prohibiting the use of certain phrases in channel, or disallowing the use of private messages to contact channel members. Staff might promulgate a lengthy, multi-page rules document ending with a special procedure the user must employ to be voiced in the channel (to make sure they've read the entire document before asking any questions).

Such arbitrary rule sets tend to grow longer over time, because they don't solve the real problem. You can't answer every question, and you shouldn't try. Be gentle, be courteous, be flexible and be as patient and helpful as you can---but let someone else try to answer questions that you find too frustrating. Don't try to be a superhuman support machine.

The entire page is an interesting read and they also have to say something about ESR's document:

Please think before referring people to links such as this one, which combine suggestions for making support requests with a casual attitude of superiority over the newbie. Helping other people takes patience.

Nuff said...
--
Tips for posting to the forums.
When your problem is solved, please post a follow-up to the thread you started.

--
The Manual | Troubleshooting FAQ | Tips for posting.

This thread is a disgrace...

Posted by pamphile on January 13, 2006 at 7:03pm

This thread is a disgrace... Reminds me a primary school where the "cool kids" laugh at the new kid.

To whatever newbie that reads this thread:
This is not the normal attitude of helpful Drupal users.

Marcel
http://www.macminiforums.com/forums/

http://goingtochina.com - I love China - Chinese Tourism and Business
http://01Business.com - Business 2 Business Directory

i second that emotion.

Posted by Dublin Drupaller on January 13, 2006 at 7:07pm

I couldn't agree more mpamphile..this is painfully embarassing.

Any newcomers looking at this thread..I second mpamphiles point that not all Drupallers are like that.

Dub

I agree with mpamphile and

Posted by Cabbitsama on January 13, 2006 at 9:51pm

I agree with mpamphile and Geary, this is just sad. I chat with people beginning websites and other various projects all the time. A lot of them ask really simple questions (sometimes they really don't make any sense at all). It's obvious they just don't know where to start. Instead of treating him like an idiot you should have pointed him to one of the threads with a showcase of drupal sites so that he can see just what he's dealing with and what drupal is capable of. When I first installed drupal I didn't know what the hell I was doing and it took a while for even the concept of boxes to start clicking to me. I would have been very discouraged if I had gotten the same sort of smart ass responses from a support channel. So yes, if any new person trying out drupal notices this thread, be aware that the greator majority of the community will try to be helpful and as tolerant as possible. It is only those few who will try to make themselves look good and trash you for being a newbie.

Drupal has a very cool community

Posted by bomarmonk on January 13, 2006 at 10:44pm

You are not always going to find a fix or an answer right away, but Drupal is a great piece of open source software with a lot of flexibility that serves many needs.

These many needs create many demands not only on the software but on the community. For the most part, I'd say with a little bit of patience, the community will almost always come through in some shape or form (I do think that expectations have to be realistic here and that some attempt must be made by the user to be self motivated and explore a bit on their own).

I can understand both sides of the equation here:

On one hand, here is a new user being rather self-righteous and exhibiting little respect.

On the other hand I've been that new user looking for solutions. Sometimes you post things the wrong way or in the wrong place. However, I don't think that I ever began dictating how the open source community should serve me (although, I may be a bit demanding at times-- at least as far as what I am trying to get the software to do).

I would guess that the new user mentioned above will have to tone down his approach if he expects to get the most out of this community. I know that sometimes I've been frustrated (you can track my posts and see some areas where I was pulling my hair out, practically) but I always came back with a great respect for those who knew more than me and who are still, at this point, able to contribute a great deal more to this project.

Thanks for all the help so far. From my experience, I'll keep coming back to this project and I'll hopefully be able to support it even more in the future. We shall see.

Community is genuinely helpful

Posted by rubenk on January 13, 2006 at 11:21pm

I have had a rather pleasant experience here, having just set up my drupal site www.tabletpcpeople.org . I am a person, however, who went through, looked at all the different CMS distros I could find (Mambo, phpNuke, etc) and then decided that I'd try drupal because the example sites were excellent and I saw lots of interesting modules. I installed it on a hassle free bluehost account and then when I tried modifying things is when I hit an upwards battle. Some things are assummed and hard to find, like installation txts would say put the module in modules (OK) and run XXX.mysql (hmmm....). It took me over an hour to search the forums and figure out that I could go to myPHP and browse for the file, run it etc.

The community may run into problems with people like me who think they know what they are doing, and then jump in, but on the other hand, with a lot of patience, I have found most answers to my questions in the somewhat hard to search forum. The reason I say that people like me may be difficult is because I am a noob but have some VB programming skills, mostly in object oriented progs so I am unfamiliar with the scripting that I see and don't expect some things to be as difficult as they are. However, the community has done it's best to try and support me:

For example when I had a problem trying to let people embed video into their personal blog nodes, I'd monkey around to the forums and start up a new thread (sort of a shotgun approach) because I didn't know where else to go, ala
http://drupal.org/node/44308
and here
http://drupal.org/node/43637

I genuinely think most people realize that asking questions in the right place will get you an answer and think this guy above was too lazy to do his homework. I even pm'd fox8, who is the author on video.module to ask him specific questions about modifying the module to work in people's blogs instead of its own standalone node (I don't even know the right vernacular, really). My point is...Sure, I really haven't received a clear solution, but the community is definitely trying and people aren't shirking my attempts but the prog. language barrier is pretty difficult and the things people like me have come to expect (in my case, a corporate rocketboom idea) may be bleeding edge in terms of usability.

P.S.>>>On that note, if anybody is interested in my media suggestions, just ask, but somewhere else (right?). :-)

I agree that this community

Posted by solipsist on January 18, 2006 at 8:38pm

I agree that this community is extremely helpful! I've asked the dumbest newbie questions on the #drupal-support channel and there have always been people around to help me. Morbus has been extremely helpful providing me with not just short answers but complete solutions and even checked on me from time to time to see if I was stuck.

Thanks to Sepeck too for extreme patience and helpfulness. Oadae, tclinek, zoro and many others too. I've probably forgotten half your nicks but you people rock!

What I intend to do is to extract all my questions from the logs I have and eventually write a newbie FAQ. I realized my questions were common but were not covered by the handbooks at all or were hard to find the answer to so maybe I can do something about that and give something back.

PS. I still got lots of newb questions left to ask so don't relax yet! :)

--
Jakob Persson - NodeOne

Don't overlook the last sentence

Posted by robertDouglass on January 13, 2006 at 10:57pm

I'm willing to bet that the detail that differentiates this discourse from many others, in Morbus' mind, is the last sentence from <user>:

THis conversation WILL go into the article.

If I had been in Morbus' position, I would have felt a bit like I had been on candid camera. There is a reason the title of this post uses the word "bait". One interpretation of the conversation is that the so-called n00b was looking for someone who would provide material for their upcoming "Open Source is XXXX, Drupal is YYYY" article.

If this had happened to me, I might have reported the conversation here as well. Better that than read about the event from their point of view some days later in some publication, and be left defending myself.

- Robert Douglass

-----
My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress

my Drupal book | Twitter | Senior Drupal Advisor, Acquia | Advisor ICanLocalize

Thank you!

Posted by Morbus Iff on January 13, 2006 at 11:15pm

Thank you! Jesus.

http://www.disobey.com/
http://www.gamegrene.com/

http://www.disobey.com/
http://druplicon.info/